After almost five years with the Eclipse Foundation, I have decided to resign from my current position and will now be looking for new challenges. The Eclipse Foundation—and the Eclipse community at large—are pretty much family to me, so this has been a tough decision.

I have learned a lot from all the people I have met through all these years and I feel very lucky that I had the opportunity to serve such an amazing community.

Whether you know me directly or through this blog, you know that I am passionate about all things open source and IoT, of course, but that I also care deeply about creating vibrant ecosystems around bleeding edge technology. I will be looking for new career opportunities where I can leverage my years of experience growing and managing the Eclipse IoT ecosystem in order to help companies grow their developer or partner communities.

I will be effectively leaving the Foundation at the end of January 2019, so I will be looking forward to meeting some of you at KubeCon China next week and KubeCon North America in December. As always, you can reach out to me anytime via the contact form on this blog, or follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Last week, we launched the fifth edition of our Open IoT Challenge. It is really exciting to be back, and I am really looking forward to seeing what people will be building! The Open IoT Challenge encourages IoT enthusiasts and developers to build innovative applications for the Internet of Things using open standards and open source technology.

Every year, I try to share with aspiring applicants some ideas that I think would be worth exploring in the context of the challenge.

Blockchain/distributed ledger and IoT anyone? From IoT data monetization to security I think that, beyond all the hype, it is worth exploring how blockchain and DLT can play a role in IoT. Last year, the team from Trusting IoT took the second place in the Open IoT Challenge. They have published an incredible amount of blog posts that are a great read for anyone interested in exploring that space.

The line between edge devices (sensors and gateways) and the cloud is becoming increasingly blurry, and people are looking at fog computing (sometimes referred to as edge computing) as a way to help orchestrate highly distributed IoT architectures. I would really like to see some teams use Eclipse ioFog or Eclipse fog05 in their projects.

Like in previous years, if you are not sure whether your idea is “Open IoT Challenge worthy”, just ping me. I will be happy to give you some feedback before you actually submit your proposal!

As a reminder, the 10 best proposals will be awarded gift certificates that they can use to buy some of the hardware needed for building their project! I am looking forward to reviewing your proposals and seeing all the cool projects you will be building over the next few months.

Last month, we held our very first Eclipse IoT Day in Asia—Singapore more specifically, and it was a blast!

Ian Craggs, one of our speakers, did a really great job of writing up his summary of the event and I don’t feel like I have much to add! It was great to see that for this first event in the area, we ended up not only with an impressive line-up of speakers from all around the world but also a room literally packed with attendees.

In case you couldn’t attend, you will certainly be happy to hear that all the sessions were recorded, and are now available on our YouTube Channel. Check them out! You can also find a copy of the presentations here.